Posted
by
timothyon Sunday October 23, 2011 @02:29PM
from the because-females-are-smarter dept.

PolygamousRanchKid writes with an article exploring the question posed in the headline, which says that "One answer may lie in biology. Scientific studies have shown that people generally find women's voices more pleasing than men's. 'It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,' said Stanford University Professor Clifford Nass, author of 'The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships. 'It's a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.' One notable exception has been Germany, where BMW was forced to recall a female-voiced navigation system on its 5 Series cars in the late 1990s after being flooded with calls from German men saying they refused to take directions from a woman. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on why the company gave Siri a female voice in the U.S. Nor would she say why Siri speaks like a man in the UK, where iPhone 4S owners have swarmed online forums to request a female voice instead."

The library around here had an autodialer that would remind folks about late materials and when books were available, they used a pleasant voice from a black gentleman. It had a James Earl Jones quality to it and was quite pleasant despite being relatively unsophistication in use. Meaning that the words were taken from samples so they wouldn't quite match up even if the grammar was correct.

Because it's not that hard to find somebody with a voice that most folks would like to hear. Which is a pretty serious problem with the hypothesis that it's hard to find male voices that everybody likes.

Academic studies always show that we prefer female voices, but in reality, those who count on computer generated voices all day prefer male voices. Note all the readers mentioning James Earl Jones. The reason studies like this get it wrong is simple. They get random groups of people who never use computer voices to take part in their experiments, and such people initially prefer female voices. If the experiments were to run long enough for participants to become expert listeners, they would find they trend towards male voices. I do a lot of looking at speech signals, and my unsupported theory as to why we switch to male voices is that male voices cover a broader portion of the sweet spot in our hearing, where we perceive sound most sensitively. This makes male voices easier to listen to if you have to listen for long periods of time. They are also easier to understand in noisy environments, thus thus the classic low male ham radio voice.

To understand what people like when they have to listen a lot to computer generated voices, just ask the blind. I was the tech lead for Vinux 3.0, which is Linux for the Vision Impaired. That doesn't make me an expert, but here are my observations. The most popular voices for blind programmers are male, probably eloquence first (it can play very fast), followed by espeak (because it's free and everywhere), followed by various low-speed commercial male voices. The most popular Mac voice for the blind is Adam, a mechanical guy with a decent voice that can play at decent speed. The female voices are often discussed, usually with adjectives like sexy, emotional, sultry, and so on, but in the end the blind go back to their male TTS engines to get work done.

I did a lot of testing to try and speed up voices to the speeds the blind like to listen. The result is the sonic library, which powers speech speed-up in various programs like the Astro Nova player at up to 6X playback speed. At least one blind lister can listen with high comprehension to a male voice (eloquence) at about 1,500 words per minute, or 7X the default speed of this high speed voice. At this speed, the original vowels are typically compressed to one or two pitch periods. It's incredible that a blind listener can still perceive these as whole phonemes. To achieve higher speed, I've told him he needs to consider listening to a female voice, where I could get perhaps twice as many pitch periods into the same 10-ish milliseconds where he currently perceives one phoneme. The problem is that at higher fundamental pitch, this voice will register on a smaller portion of his hearing bandwidth, making it harder to get as much information out of it high speed. We've not yet had any luck with high speed female voices.

As a person losing central vision, I experienced all this myself. When I first started using computer generated voices, I tried to find a female voice I could live with. I tried a couple of smooth female Cepstral voices, but before long they sounded grating and frustratingly slow. My blind friend told me to avoid the "natural" voices and go with something that I could listen to at high speed, but I just couldn't stand the mechanical voice he was pushing - eloquence. Well, he was right. I eventually migrated to eloquence just like him and many blind people. James Earl Jones has the perfect voice for computers. It's low enough to take advantage of every bit of bandwidth we easily perceive. It's broad spectrum, taking advantage of the high frequencies as well, and very consistent, making his voice addictive. Your ear likes consistency.

One day I had the interesting observation on the New York Subway that the recorded voices with informational statements were female, and the statements asking the passenger to do something ("Please stand clear of the door") were all male.

In Moscow subway [ruslanguage.ru], if your train is getting closer to city center, you hear male voice ("boss hurries you to work"), and if you are travelling in opposite direction, there's a female announcer ("wife calls you home") - they switch half-way for most trains. Male-oriented hint, but still.

Actually, it's Dylan Thomas. If anyone actually spoke Welsh, they'd realise that he's saying, 'I sing to you now of the pretty milk town down the dingle where a milk maid coos to her swain. By the time we arrive her heart will have lofted like a swan, leaving the lost little lad consumed and forgotten as the lilac by the goat. Mind the gap.'

One day I had the interesting observation on the New York Subway that the recorded voices with informational statements were female, and the statements asking the passenger to do something ("Please stand clear of the door") were all male.

In Barcelona they did this 20 years ago already. A female voice said: "Proxima estacion", and a male one said: "Catalunya". I found it very entertaining then.

In Barcelona they did this 20 years ago already. A female voice said: "Proxima estacion", and a male one said: "Catalunya". I found it very entertaining then.

This is actually an excellent feature--I noticed it when I was in Barcelona a few years ago, and I would be thrilled to see more cities adopt it. Making the name of the station audibly distinct is an excellent cue for listeners in the often-loud subway with its muffled, broken, or distorted public address systems. As an added bonus, subway riders who don't speak Catalan or Spanish get the important information - the station name - clearly set off from the surrounding announcement.

My experience in NYC was that the "stand clear of the doors" message was live audio, getting progressively angrier as people failed to get out of the doors? That may have been a Metro North train though; I took a lot of trains that trip.

No, he is talking about Majel Barret playing Number One in "The Cage" - the original Start Trek pilot with Captain Pike; the one that was later made into "The Menagerie" where Spock was court martial-ed for returning Pike to Talos IV after his severe radiation burns rendered him wheel chair bound. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059753/ [imdb.com]

In the BMW it could be a real physical toggle somewhere, but an OS setting would work as well. In Apple's case they need to relax a little, pull the stick out, and let the people toggle which voice they want, even MS allows that on their voice related functions.

The trouble is that Navigation systems have two very distinct narration types. One is a set of prerecorded sentences and words. Those are relatively inexpensive to make, and most celebrity navigation systems use this. For example all NavTones voices use this style.

The other is true Text-to-speech. This system is a lot harder since it requires adjusting the incredible number of parameters to get a voice that sounds a close as possible. For things like celebrities it would also work best if any canned text we

Out of the box my satnav (not Garmin) offers a choice of male voice or female voice (extra voices available for a cost). I use the female voice because it's clearer against low-frequency background noise.

Wow, you mean you can't change the voice? You've been able to switch it on Apple Talk since almost its inception. Siri seems to use the "Viki" Apple Talk voice. I assumed that it was just a default setting. "Viki" is a logical default as it's a more advanced version of the old "Victoria", and arguably the most natural sounding Apple Talk voice. It's ridiculous if they don't let you change it, even if it's a memory issue you could still switch the voice when you sync the phone.

In the army there is a known fact/myth that female voices are easier to understand on noisy radio links.Something to do white the a different/better frequency spread than a male voice.In my not very scientific experience, it seems to be true.

In WW2 ground controllers for the British Air Force were almost all women. I was told (by someone who had good reason to know) that there was a debate about whether to have women radio operators in the aircraft. There were two reasons: One was more reliable communication, the other was to prevent the Germans spoofing aircraft radio operators. A number of women operators were asked for their views and immediately volunteered to fly (a very dangerous occupation). Despite this, the proposal was turned down. The attitudes at the time were truly backward; there were women pilots who were allowed to deliver aircraft to their bases, but they were not allowed to fly with guns loaded - a quite incomprehensible decision since some of them were shot down by enemy action without a chance of fighting back.

The Germans also used women ground controllers. A funny story: when the RAF used to interfere with broadcasts on Luftwaffe channels (using "tame" native German speakers) their operations usually ended in German-speaking lady operators arguing with each other, all trying to convince the confused airmen they were a real Luftwaffe controller.

I've also heard that both birds and human babies learn better from a voice more like a womans that that of a mans. Men can of course make their voice be more like that when talking to those, so it's not such a big deal.

Female voices *are* easier to understand than male voices over the radio. And some males sound female on the radio.

*BUT*, female voices and male voices aren't significantly different from each other in pitch. Women are sometimes higher pitched, but on the whole, they're about the same pitch as male voices. The difference between the two is resonance... males tend to have larger lung capacity, and with that more space to resonate the lower frequencies in their voice, which is why their voice sounds lower pitched. This is why female voices sound higher pitched than males, and it's why some male-to-female transgenders are able to sound completely female by learning how to resonate their voice (hint: the ones who don't sound naturally female are the ones who adjust the pitch of their voice).

It's that lack of resonance that I think explains why females are easier to understand on the radio, and also why some males sound female on the radio. The radio isn't a very good medium for transferring something like resonance, because it's a single point of sound at the output, and usually not a particularly high end speaker at that... as a result, female voices sound more natural over the radio, and males sound distorted. It's not that they're *actually* distorted, just that they don't sound quite like we expect them to sound, and it causes a cognitive dissonance.

Female voices span a greater range of the audio frequency spectrum than male voices. So a loud, narrowband background noise (e.g. engine/road/wind noise when driving on the freeway) has a greater chance of making it difficult to hear a male voice, while a female voice cuts right through.

Higher frequency sounds carry more energy for the same amplitude (volume) than low frequency sounds, and drop off more quickly with distance (gets absorbed more readily by the air - why foghorns are low-pitched). So the environment normally has less high frequency background noise.

Lower frequencies require bigger speakers, so it's easier to crank up the volume of a female voice using a smaller speaker.

Your nerd "technical reasons" leave us no room for endless inflammatory arguments and trite gender sterotyping! How will we fill the empty silence now?

We could have general discussions about the treatment and oppression or lack thereof of men women and hermaphrodites in different settings, like for example among geeks, the free software community or in general.

Citation, please? I think the opposite would be true. First of all, consonants have generally high frequencies and wide spectra, so the low male vowels will make the whole spectrum wider. Secondly, harmonic frequencies are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, so a male voice has more of these harmonics within the audible range. This is why deep male voices are good test material for audio systems. For example, lossy compression schemes will remove some of the harmonics, so female voices would be

Even assuming the 1990s were the middle ages, this is hard to believe. Firstly, nearly all navigational systems I've encountered here in Germany in the past ten years have female voices (if they have any), and the public transport system's automated announcements have been made by a female voice since forever.

I've read (though I can't quote sources, sorry) that the main reason computerised voices on navigation aids is female is the higher pitch. In jets where that sort of thing was pioneered it made the voice easier to distinguish clearly from the "background" noise of the engines without having to raise the volume, and presumably the difference is similar in cars.

There may be cultural reasons too, of course, but this theory of a physical reason makes sense to me.

From my experience the gender of the synthetic voices has been male by default so I don't recognize this. The default voice on the old Amiga narrator.device was male. The default voice on loud-reading software used to be NeoSpeech Paul which has been one of the best English spoken computer narrator compilations out there.The GPS software I have used have both male and female voices in different languages to choose from, I have primarily used TomTom and Navigon. I cannot recall that I preferred one gender ov

There are a few possible reasons. One is that I'm pretty darn sure the TTS occurs locally, which means they are limited to the processor on the phone. Even then, the voice is more artificial than the phone is capable of, so I doubt this was a major factor.

Possibility two is that while the TTS is definitely the one part of Siri that can be replaced without any impact on the rest, they may have stuck with whatever TTS engine was in use by SRI when they were developing SIRI just to get it out the door as quick

Least for IVRs, on average people find male voices more intimidating than female voices. We also find female voices more nurturing than male voices on average.

Other posters have already point this out. Suggestions ( facilitated by nurturing speaker ) then women are used. Commands ( facilitated by intimidation, i.e. subtle threat of punishment ) then males are more often used.

Systems where you may need to intimidate the listener a bit will tend to use male voices. I kid you not, but in the future pay attention to how many collections operators or conflict desks sound 'black'. Also think of how often you spoke to a collections/conflict department and got a deep voiced male. Now compare that to how often you called the general operator and got a deep voiced male.

It seems to me though that most audiobooks are read by men, and of the ones I have read by women, I find the voice irritating. These are real people though, maybe its more to do with how male and female voices are synthed.

I've listened to a couple of librevoice recordings from gutenberg, and I think that the real reason is that women, generally, like to read books more than men, so they get the idea that they would like volunteer to read for an audio book as well.

But, they're volunteers, not professional voice actors, so everything comes out as some kind of sing-songy poem read for kids. It's not that women are worse at voice acting than men, it's just that in the amateur reading department there are more of them. The mal

after being flooded with calls from German men saying they refused to take directions from a woman.

For real? Not only were these men pissed off about taking direction from a computerized woman's voice, but they also felt it necessary to call BMW to bitch about it. And then, BMW took these tools seriously enough to recall the cars? This just has to be a urban legend.

Surely most people prefer to listen to the opposite sex, provided they do not suffer from sexual identity disorder or a similar crippling condition...

I'm guessing it's the same phenomenon as with magazines. The manly magazines are full of highly attractive women. The womanly magazines are also full of highly attractive women. Men like talking to a woman. Women like talking to another woman. It probably goes all the way back to our cavemen days where women were chatting at camp or out gathering, while the men were more rivals and out hunting pray, which obviously leads to less talking. So most everyone feels better talking to a woman, except when taking directions on where to drive. Which some say can also be traced back to our cavemen days...

Surely? Is it possible that you don't understand that women experience a lot of ups and downs, due to hormonal changes? While women MIGHT prefer a male voice SOMETIMES, there are other times that she might prefer that men don't exist. And, no, pregnancy and menstrual cycles are NOT considered to be crippling conditions. Menopause might be considered as such, but don't let my wife know that I said that!

I'm glad you pointed this out. I found the summary... well, frankly, offensive. Hardly any of the sexists I know are German, and I am certainly not! Its beginning to seem like one can't be hardly misogynistic these days without being accused of being German. We're sexist, not savages!

Giving the user a choice would imply that they know better than Apple does about what is best.

Apple's entire business model is founded on the operational assumption that they know better than the customer. Their present success is founded on the fact that they are quite often correct about this....